Harold
Bloom is
the Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, where
he has been on the faculty for half a century.
Arguably the nation's most widely influential literary critic, his
books include The Visionary Company (1961), Yeats (1970), The
Anxiety of Influence (1973), The Flight to
Lucifer: Gnostic Fantasy (1980),
Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from
the Bible to the Present (1989), The
American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (1992), Omens
of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996),
and Jesus
and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005).

I first met Prof. Bloom in 1995 when I took his junior Shakespeare
seminar at Yale. He once called me "very shrewd" in class,
but wound up giving me a B in the course. I interviewed him at his
home in New Haven in 2005.